HE books which help you most are those which make you think the most,” says Theodore Parker. “The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so.”
And apropos of this, I present the following list of books recommended by Dr. John Brown as suitable for the reading of young medical students. Yet not only medical students, but students of other special subjects, and teachers as well, will find it profitable to dig into and through, to “energize upon” and master, such books as these—
1. Arnauld’s Port Royal Logic; translated by T. S. Baynes.
2. Thomson’s Outlines of the Necessary Laws of Thought.
3. Descartes on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences.
4. Coleridge’s Essay on Method.
5. Whately’s Logic and Rhetoric (new and cheap edition).
6. Mill’s Logic (new and cheap edition).
7. Dugald Stewart’s Outlines.
8. Sir John Herschel’s Preliminary Dissertation.
9. Isaac Taylor’s Elements of Thought.
10. Sir William Hamilton’s edition of Reid: Dissertations and Lectures.
11. Professor Fraser’s Rational Philosophy.
12. Locke on the Conduct of the Understanding.
“Taking up a book like Arnauld, and reading a chapter of his lively, manly sense,” says Rab’s friend, “is like throwing your manuals, and scalpels, and microscopes, and natural (most unnatural) orders out of your hand and head, and taking a game with the Grange Club, or a run to the top of Arthur Seat. Exertion quickens your pulse, expands your lungs, makes your blood warmer and redder, fills your mouth with the pure waters of relish, strengthens and supples your legs; and though on your way to the top you may encounter rocks, and baffling débris, and gusts of fierce winds rushing out upon you from behind corners, just as you will find, in Arnauld and all truly serious and honest books of the kind, difficulties and puzzles, winds of doctrine, and deceitful mists, still you are rewarded at the top by the wide view. You see, as from a tower, the end of all. You look into the perfections and relations of things; you see the clouds, the bright lights, and the everlasting hills on the horizon. You come down the hill a happier, a better, and a hungrier man, and of a better mind. But, as we said, you must eat the book,—you must crush it, and cut it with your teeth, and swallow it; just as you must walk up, and not be carried up, the hill, much less imagine you are there, or look upon a picture of what you would see were you up, however accurately or artistically done; no,—you yourself must do both.”
The same may be said of all books that are the most truly helpful to us, and mind-lifting. It is the hard reading that profits most, provided, always, that due care be taken to digest that which is read. Yet I would not recommend the same strong diet or the same severe exercise to every person, or even to any considerable proportion of readers. One man may be a palm, as says Dr. Collyer, and another a pine; that which is wisdom to the one may be incomprehensible folly to the other. But those whose mental constitutions are sufficiently vigorous to digest and assimilate the food which the philosophers offer, may find comfort and health, not only in the works above recommended, but in the following—
Plato’s Works: Jowett’s translation.
G. H. Lewes: A Chapter from Aristotle.
Lord Bacon: Novum Organum.
Butler: Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed.
Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature.
Hamilton: Discussions on Philosophy and Literature.
Mill: Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy.
Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind.
Cousin: Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
Martineau: The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte.
Mill: Comte and Positivism.
Mahaffy: Kant’s Critical Philosophy for English Readers.
Fichte: The Science of Knowledge.
Meiklejohn: Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason (published in Bohn’s Philosophical Library).
Spencer: First Principles of Philosophy.
Bowen: Essays on Speculative Philosophy.
Porter: Elements of Intellectual Science.
—— The Human Intellect.
McCosh: Intuitions of the Mind.
—— System of Logic.
Fiske: Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy.
Everett: Science of Thought.
Wallace: The Logic of Hegel.
Hegel: The Philosophy of History (translated by J. Sibree, in Bohn’s Philosophical Library).
Schopenhauer: Select Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Droppers and Dachsel).
Lewes: Biographical History of Philosophy.
Morell: An Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century.
Ueberweg: History of Philosophy.
Masson: Recent British Philosophy.
Lecky: History of European Morals.
—— History of Rationalism in Europe.
Draper: History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.
To the foregoing list the following may be added—
Plutarch’s Morals (translated by Goodwin).
Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (in the “Wisdom Series”).
Selections from Fénelon.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
Sydney Smith’s Sketches of Moral Philosophy.
Watts on the Mind.
Taine on Intelligence.